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Mark Everett, out of our Dallas office, sent me an e-mail the other day asking me why I haven’t posted anything about SharePoint 2010’s new calendar overlay functionality. Honestly, I hadn’t yet posted anything on the topic since it was the first I had heard that it even existed.

…so I did some digging, and here you are…..

The Overview

So it turns out that SharePoint 2010 has a new built in feature to aggregate up to 10 calendars into a single color-coded view. Apparently it’s a well known feature, but I apparently missed the memo.

This is probably a pretty useful feature for PMOs or program managers who are looking for ways to aggregate multiple project calendars.

If you’re not using project calendars, I point out that many of my clients actually use them quite heavily by e-mail enabling the calendar. Once that’s done, the project calendar may be “invited” to project meetings just like a real person. Any meeting invite will automatically get posted to the calendar, which in effect, works much like a project journal.

This functionality puts all of the project meetings into a single calendar – useful when your PMO maintains visibility into all of the key project meetings.

The Set Up

It’s actually surprisingly easy to create a new aggregated calendar. Just create a new calendar list within your SharePoint site. In this example, I will create one in the main PWA site.

Click on the options to View All Site Content under the Site Actions menu in the top left.

Select the calendar option.

Once the calendar has been created. Choose the option in the Calendar tab to add a Calendar Overlay.

Choose the option for a new calendar.

Configure the next screen to point to the target calendar. Choose a color, and you’re off to the races.

Note that you may change the default view to filter on specific meeting types such as status meetings or key phase gate meetings.